Intel NUC DC3217BY Review w/ Windows 8

General NUC Performance

The Intel NUC scored P594 on 3DMark Vantage with the performance preset. The Intel HD 4000 graphics scored 515 on the GPU test and the Intel Core i5-3217U processor scored 2385 on the Physics test.

In PCMark 7 we found the Intel NUC had an overall score of 4167.

Moving along to Cinebench we found the Intel NUC with the Intel Core i5-3217M processor scored 15.79 FPS on the OpenGL benchmark and then 1.82 points on the multi-core CPU test.

A quick look at the memory performance showed just shy of 18 GB/s of bandwidth. This sounds about right for a dual channel memory kit running at 1600MHz with 11-11-11-28 2T memory timings. The Kingston 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz SO-DIMM memory modules ran perfectly on the NUC even though it is officially rated as supporting just 1333MHz and 1600MHz memory speeds. The NUC is capable of being overclocked, which is pretty impressive for such a small system with limited cooling options.

A quick run of CrystalDiskMark v3.0.2 showed the sequential read speed at 435 MB/s and the write speed at 254 MB/s! The Random 4K read speed was 20MB/s and the 4K random write speed was 44MB/s. The Intel Solid-State Drive 525 mSATA 180GB drive performed great as you can see!

Taking a look at another storage benchmark called ATTO, we find that the SSD reaching speeds of up to 550MB/s read and 529MB/s write!

The last performance test that we wanted to run was Bootracer 4.0 to see how fast the system is able to boot Windows 8 Enterprise. We were happy it takes just 8 seconds to get to the logon screen in just 24 seconds everything was up and running on the desktop!

The results ranged from 23-24 seconds of total time fairly consistently as you can see from the result log. The Intel NUC was is a fairly powerful little system that has basically the same numbers that we have become accustomed to on Intel Ultrabooks. This isn’t a system that you’ll want to run AutoCAD on